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Technology report

New bots, new prefs

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By Evad37

Rolled out

  • Global preferences were rolled out on 10 July as announced at the Village Pump.
  • TemplateStyles enabled as previously covered in our May issue.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Bot tasks

Recently approved tasks
Current requests for approval

Latest tech news

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #27, #28, and #29. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

  • The database for tags will be changed. This happened on 2 July on French Wikipedia and 9 July on all other wikis. Please report if recent changes get slower or you can't save edits. This could especially affect editors who use the database on ToolForge. (source)
  • WebM video files have smaller file size but still be of the same quality. Creating WebM files will take longer time. (source)
  • The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. This was supposed to already have happened but was delayed. For most wikis this will happen on 9 July. For the rest it will happen on 16 July. (source)
  • Advanced item All wikis now use the Remex parsing library instead of Tidy. This could cause errors. You can help fix the errors. (source)
  • When you edit a link in the visual editor, there will be two separate fields for the link target (target) and display text (label). (source 1, source 2)
  • On the mobile version, you can find a link to an editor's contributions from their user page. Now this will work even if they haven't created a user page. (source)
  • When you edit a discussion on the mobile version, you sometimes get your signature automatically added. Now, this will no longer happen if you have already signed your post. This is to avoid double signatures. (source)
  • Structured discussions toolbars will have more style options. (source)
  • Advanced item When you look at Wikimedia code in Gerrit, there will be a new interface. It is on by default for new users and developers. This is to make it easier to understand what is happening. (source)
  • You can now use global preferences on Wikimedia wikis. You can set them on the global preferences page. (source)
  • You can now see a new log of pages being created at Special:Log/create. It includes pages which are later deleted. It is now available on all Wikimedia wikis except Commons and Wikidata. (source)
  • You can see how many page views a wiki had from specific countries. The Wikistats2 maps have now been updated. (source)
  • Your watchlist will show changes from the last seven days by default instead of just three. If you have already set a length preference, it will not change. (source)
  • When you log in to your account, you can choose to keep being logged in. This checkbox now works better than before on the mobile version for users without JavaScript. (source)
  • Wikis that use Citoid can automatically generate citations for Swedish news sites. This only works in the visual editor. This now works for Swedish public service radio. More will come. Others could use this to add news sites in other languages in the future. (source)
  • Editors can submit a maximum of 90 edits per minute. This is new since last month. This does not affect bots or administrators. (source)
Problems
  • When you rolled back an edit, it could get both the Rollback and Undo tags. This has been fixed. (source)
  • Rollbacks from autopatrolled users were not marked as patrolled. This has been fixed. (source)
Future changes
  • Presently, all administrators can edit CSS and JavaScript for the entire wiki. There will be a new user group for editing CSS and JavaScript. Administrators will no longer automatically be able to do this. This is because it is a security risk when all administrator accounts can edit JavaScript even if they never plan to or do not know how it works. You can read more here. (source)
  • Page previews will be on by default for new accounts. (source)
  • Some articles have messages to readers about problems with the article—for example, that it does not cite sources or might not be neutral. Readers do not see these messages on the mobile version. The developers now want to show them. You can read more and leave feedback here.
  • You can use <inputbox> to create search boxes for specific pages, such as for searching the archives of a community discussion page. Instead of prefix:Page name, you will see a text that explains which pages are being searched. You can read more and leave feedback here.
Meetings
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 3:00–4:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.

Installation code

Further information: Wikipedia:User scripts § How to install user scripts
  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:BethNaught/hideSectionDesktop.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:BethNaught/hideSectionDesktop.js]]
  2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Danski454/WhoisSidebar.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Danski454/WhoisSidebar.js]]
  3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Yair rand/HistoryView.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Yair rand/HistoryView.js]]
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